Analyzing inconsistencies in the Tor consensus
Pages 485 - 494
Abstract
Every distributed system needs some way to list its current participants. The Tor networks consensus is one way of tackling this challenge. But creating a shared list of participants and their properties without a central authority is a challenging task, especially if the system is constantly targeted by nation state attackers. This work carefully examines the Tor consensuses created in the last two years, identifies weaknesses that did already impact users, and proposes improvements to strengthen the Tor consensus in the future. Our results show undocumented voting behavior by directory authorities and suspicious groups of relays that try to conceal the fact that they are all operated by the same entity.
References
[1]
James Ball, Bruce Schneider, and Glenn Greenwald. 2013. NSA and GCHQ target Tor network that protects anonymity of web users. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack-tor-network-encryption
[2]
Bram Cohen. 2008. The BitTorrent Protocol Specification. https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html
[3]
Roger Dingledine. 2021. Exit relay operators please help test #2667 branch. https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2021-January/019258.html
[4]
Toralf Förster. 2021. Questions about consensus votes. https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2021-April/019604.html
[5]
Sebastian Hahn. 2021. Questions about consensus votes. https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2021-April/019603.html
[6]
Tobias Höller, Michael Roland, and René Mayrhofer. 2021. On the state of V3 onion services. In 11th Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI ’21) (Virtual Event, USA). ACM, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3473604.3474565
[7]
juga. 2019. How Bandwidth Scanners Monitor The Tor Network. https://blog.torproject.org/how-bandwidth-scanners-monitor-tor-network
[8]
Karsten Loesing, Steven J. Murdoch, and Roger Dingledine. 2010. A Case Study on Measuring Statistical Data in the Tor Anonymity Network. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Ethics in Computer Security Research (WECSR 2010) (Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain) (LNCS). Springer.
[9]
Tor metrics team. 2021. Tor metrics. https://metrics.torproject.org
[10]
nusenu. 2021. say hi (and goodbye) to >1000 new exit relays at OVH. https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2021-May/019644.html
[11]
The Tor Project. 2019. Tor directory protocol, version 3. https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/dir-spec.txt
[12]
Nakamoto Satoshi. 2009. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
[13]
sednet. 2013. TOR wants your spare bandwidth. https://www.linode.com/community/questions/8475/tor-wants-your-spare-bandwidth
[14]
youiopmop. 2019. Setup a Tor relay on FreeBSD 12. https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/setup-a-tor-relay-on-freebsd-12
Index Terms
- Analyzing inconsistencies in the Tor consensus
Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.
Recommendations
Improving the Privacy of Tor Onion Services
Applied Cryptography and Network SecurityAbstractOnion services enable bidirectional anonymity for parties that communicate over the Tor network, thus providing improved privacy properties compared to standard TLS connections. Since these services are designed to support server-side anonymity, ...
Safely Measuring Tor
CCS '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications SecurityTor is a popular network for anonymous communication. The usage and operation of Tor is not well-understood, however, because its privacy goals make common measurement approaches ineffective or risky. We present PrivCount, a system for measuring the Tor ...
Tor forensics: Proposed workflow for client memory artefacts
AbstractThe Internet is now part of everyday life, and plays a significant role in communication, online shopping, online banking, etc. However, one of the current issues with using the Internet is lack of security since it is still possible ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
November 2021
658 pages
ISBN:9781450395564
DOI:10.1145/3487664
Copyright © 2021 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 30 December 2021
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
- Research
- Refereed limited
Conference
iiWAS2021
iiWAS2021: The 23rd International Conference on Information Integration and Web Intelligence
November 29 - December 1, 2021
Linz, Austria
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 93Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)15
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 24 Nov 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
Cited By
View allView Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign inFull Access
View options
View or Download as a PDF file.
PDFeReader
View online with eReader.
eReaderHTML Format
View this article in HTML Format.
HTML Format